Now let’s leave Turkey and head south to Morocco, where an 18-year-old girl was sentenced to three months in prison for smoking during Ramadan.
Le juge a rejeté la demande de liberté provisoire sous caution de la famille de la jeune fille. Cette dernière a expliqué qu’elle avait mal à la tête et avait besoin de fumer une cigarette pour se calmer.
Cependant, la police lui aurait fait subir un examen médical pour trouver toute indisposition qui pourrait l’exempter du jeûne, en vain.
The judge rejected a request by the family to release her into their custody even though they explained that she’d had a headache and needed a cigarette to relax. Clearly there was no point in requesting that the case be thrown out because how the fuck is it the business of the law if someone smokes in public during Ramadan?
Pour rappel, selon l’article 222 du Code pénal marocain, est passible d’un 1 à 6 mois de prison, assortie d’une amende, « celui qui, notoirement connu pour son appartenance à la religion musulmane, rompt ostensiblement le jeûne dans un lieu public pendant le temps du Ramadan, sans motif admis par cette religion».
Article 22 of the Moroccan penal code – 1 to 6 months in prison for one who, well known to belong to the Muslim religion, apparently breaks the fast in a public place during Ramadan, without any motive recognized by that religion.
Oh fuck off.
smoking is a kind of eating? The logic is odd. They might as well say “we felt like throwing an 18 year old woman into jail because we just felt like it, and we could, so we did.” Why pretend that it’s about smoking being a kind of eating?
Smoking is the same as eating just like (to the hardcore Jewish sects) electricity is the same as fire. Of course given that comparison I wonder what the Muslim view of things like steroid inhalers are. Are you just screwed if you asthma and it’s ramadan and you have an attack? If inhaling smoke is eating then so is inhaling medicine.
Um, Claire Ramsey, that silly law doesn’t say “eating”, it says “breaking the fast”. Smoking is breaking the fast for most types of fast I ever heard of.
The logic is fine, but theocracy is evil.
No. Smoking is considered a kind of consumption. It’s not allowed for men too. It sounds mad to us but remember. It is the law. It would have been levied against anyone doing it.
Eudaemon, people with medical needs for doing so are canonically exempt from fasting and such restrictions in Islam, as are children before puberty. Whether that’s always the way the law is applied is another question, but nominally, at least, requiring an inhaler or insulin or whatever would be halal. Jewish law runs the same way, I know; I don’t know what the Catholics do or did about their fasting rules. Where possible, the person should make up the time later (in the case of an acute condition, I would guess).
In the same way, a Muslim at threat of their life may consume pork, if so doing would conserve life. In that respect, at least, the Muslims and Jews seem fairly logical. But both make allowance for capital punishment, so it’s hardly a “life is always important” approach, either.
And anyway it’s more pious to follow the “rule” even if it does threaten your health, so for people who want to be more pious there’s always that pressure, internal if not external. And since the fast includes water…it’s just a seriously horrible stupid “rule.”
Absolutely. Like I say, the way the law says it works and the way it actually works don`t necessarily have to have much to do with one another. In fact, I`m off to have a tutoring session with a Muslim client, and I`m quite sure he`s going to talk up the awesomeness of fasting for one`s health, as he has at pretty much every session so far during Ramadan, despite my pointing out that a) I`m not Muslim, and b) my meds have to be taken with food, and c) without meds I`m an immobile lump of flesh on my bed.
Pain in my ass, honestly, but needs must when the wolf`s a-scratching.
CatieCat @7: … I`m off to have a tutoring session with a Muslim client, and I`m quite sure he`s going to talk up the awesomeness of fasting for one`s health …
Cf. the Jewish set-piece on “pork carries trichinae, shellfish carry worse, and both can turn bad real fast in a Levantine climate.” In some sense Godsaidit would be a more rational defense of these practices. BTW, show me a mammal of a genus other than Homo that would voluntarily abstain from food and drink unless its little tummy was upset.